How one e-commerce business grew email traffic 410% and GWP from email marketing by 787%
Company
Footman James
Company
Financial Services & Insurance
Skills
GA4 / Google Tag Manager / Google Tag / Acoustic / HTML / CSS / GTM / Email marketing / Marketing automation
Footman James is one of the leading classic and specialist vehicle insurance brokers in the UK.
Footman James’ ecommerce quote and buy platform is an integral component to the success of the business, traffic is gained from multiple channels including organic, email, SMS, PPC, social media and direct.
The challenge
The two challenges faced by Footman James were:
- Ensuring web tracking and cross domain tracking of the website and ecommerce site which is a single page application (SPA) was working correctly.
- Footman James’ ecommerce platform is a single page application that uses a ‘#’ fragment within the URL.
The solution
The solution to this very technical issue? Understanding the behaviour of the ‘#’ fragment within Google Analytics, Acoustic and other platforms, and tools.
Extensive testing of various versions of the URL allowed me to understand which part of the URL was being omitted due to the fragment in Google Analytics and Acoustic breaking the URL.
Once this was understood I could use Google Tag Manager to debug and test the solution of overwriting the URL value that is passed back to the page location field Google Analytics.
I used the values pushed into the custom history event within the data layer by the SPA to assess the values that would indicate progression through the quote and buy.
To ensure that the URLs worked as expected in emails we would need to populate the UTM parameters before the platform appends them to the links before being sent.
The result
In a matter of weeks, Footman James began to see their e-commerce traffic from email campaigns grow by 410%. After one year they saw email traffic grow by 367%.
As a result of this, the email channel is now 4th highest traffic-driving channel.
- Paid search
- Direct
- Organic
- Paid Social
In addition, revenue from the channel also increased by 787% year on year.
Resolving this tracking issue ensured that going forward all URLs to the quote & buy site are QA’d in all new email campaigns and allowed the business to continue their email marketing and automation drive.